Unmasking Observations

By George Handlery, on October 18th, 2017

An anniversary approaches. We remember the Bolshevik’s totalitarian coup against the Provisional Government that had replaced Czarist autocracy in 1917. Therefore, a few associated items follow about radical collectivism.

Nothing will create more poverty than a movement that demands unlimited power to make all men equally well endowed.

The political program to create equality, regardless of the dissimilar abilities and drives of persons, will need dictatorial power to replace the regulating mechanism of the free market in which free people participate.

Which equality do we strive for? Is it the opportunity of equal access to skills that are rewarded according to their worth? Alternatively, do we desire the equality of withdrawals from the community’s cookie jar? Wealth needs to be created before it can be distributed. That happens best through the voluntary cooperation of those that pursue their individual interests by improving themselves. Once a system can enforce unrewarded cooperation to serve a “higher” end than what the people support willingly, the result is general poverty lived in servitude.

Man made, ideologically imposed poverty does not have the attribute of being shared equally. Those, whose will replaces society’s freely given consent and interest-driven cooperation, will not fail to allocate to themselves benefits that correspond to their self-determined worth. This is why, in countries where all are skinny, the Maduros and the Kims are rotund.

“Unconditional guaranteed income” is a project that gains support as a panacea for society’s ills. While it avoids the socialist-communist label, “liberal” levelers who seek a mandate to organize their just society, propagate it. The virtue of the plan is said to be that it removes the pressure to make a living on those that generate “great ideas”. The scheme differs from classical communism in that it postulates only a basic standard. Meanwhile, high incomes would be tolerated –and needed to fund the element that demands support according to its need, regardless of what it does or does not do. The idea of an income irrespective of performance contains a defiant detachment from the facts in favor of a theory, and so it can ignore the disastrous long-term practical record of artificial equality.

The incessant retread of concepts that, under various labels, had failed in the past, tells us something worth knowing and noting: “Idiots might die, idiocies live eternally”.

Leftist collectivism attracts “non-conformist” intellectuals. About these, it is to be known that, schooling in theories does not make one wise in practice. Especially true if the member of the anointed circle leads a sheltered life. The reference to the “shelter” explains the historical inclination to fall for the theoretical that excludes reference to critical skepticism. It also tells why the dissident junior members of the well-endowed bourgeoisie are so overrepresented among the “revolutionary” leaders of the radical right and left.

An attraction of the leftist economic model is that otherwise insignificant intellectuals may manage its implementation. Thereby they receive a self-bestowed mandate to lead, and to do good by transferring to takers what others have created. This ultimately undermines society’s ability to produce in order to regenerate earlier grants. That will diminish what those with the power to make allotments can hand out. Once that comes about, the resulting scarcity will compel the system’s managers to substitute coercion for shrinking grants.

The faith’s founders proved with impeccable abstract logic that communism will come about because of poverty and injustice. Once empowered in the real world, communism produced poverty, injustice, and to cover that up, systemic mass murder.

Is that “mass murder” a negative that scares people away?. As Che Guevara T-shirts indicate, if it passes unpunished, the license to murder attracts.

Regardless of manipulated elections, a majority of present-day Russians genuinely support Putin. His mandate is to provide stability, prosperity and glory. Once again, a calamitous characteristic of Russian history asserts itself. As things evolve, the first two goals become the victims of the irrational pursuit of the third ambition. It is to get “everything” instead of being modestly content with just “a lot” that one already has.

Another failure of irrational and irresponsible leadership comes to mind if one evaluates the seventy years of the post-colonial era. “Nothing fails more thoroughly than a successful “national liberation movement”.

Since that holds true in certain world-neighborhoods, it seems that independence is not a solution, but only a pre-condition, to bring about solutions.

Certain circles tend to sell “solutions” achievable only under their leadership, which, predictably, drives the cart of the community into a morass. Once the conditions that emerge become intolerable, the same elite will claim to be the only team that can rescue voters from the hell that they were lured into.

Some might have noticed: the European Union likes to flex muscles it does not have.

Not accidentally, that finding makes one think of present-day liberals. Liberals perform magnificently when they need to deal with opponents that are also liberals, that is, with those that share their world-view. So far, so good. Alas, the many bullies on the international and, increasingly on the national scene, are not liberals. Meanwhile, as the record of the left-liberal EU proves, they are not beyond bullying –as in “punishing” Britain for the Brexit- whenever it is assumed that the victim is “civilized”, is dependent, or has no teeth. Therefore, the liberal response to real threats is to give in while spinning ingenious excuses that prove that surrender is a virtue. That will, without fail, not defang the rattlesnakes, but it will provoke their contempt that is then expressed by new demands.

In that light –and also due to the additional confirmation by Austria’s election- it is not surprising that Europe’s leading post-liberal democrat, Victor Orbán, is made to state that “Instead of a liberal era we need to have a democratic one, because the people of Europe is not in agreement with the liberal politics that rules it”. As the bankruptcy of the policy of migration reveals, the EU “is incapable of defending Europe’s peoples”. Continued mismanagement of the common weal indicates that, increasingly, the opposition of left-liberal rule is the people itself and not “right-wing populist” monsters.